414 • PEIERLS, SIR RUDOLF
considered a likely Soviet spy suspect by MI5 and a candidate for
the source invenonacodenamedcharlesandrest, especially as
he had worked at Kellex upon his arrival in New York, before the
British party moved to Los Alamos in August 1944, but the search in
England for a leak was abandoned as soon as Fuchs confessed. In
America, though, the FBI continued to pursue both Peierls and his
wife and developed a large dossier on the couple. In it are reports
from theCentral Intelligence Agencystating that Peierls had con-
fided to a friend that he had once joined a Communist party front in
Switzerland and that his wife had been a member of the KPD. In-
deed, scrutiny of the KPD’s records, captured after the war, con-
firmed a reference to ‘‘Comrade Kannegiesser.’’ The FBI noted that
Eugenia had worked as a nurse at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in
Birmingham between 1939 and 1941, and then had joined General
Electric as a planning engineer. When in America, she had applied
for a job at Los Alamos. However, of greater concern was MI5’s rev-
elation that Peierls had received his original security clearance
through the intervention ofJohn Strachey, MP, who was himself an
espionage suspect.
The FBI reinvestigated Peierls and his wife in March 1956 when
he applied to join the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Is-
land, New York. On that occasion it was reported that Eugenia ‘‘had
admitted to being a Communist and had been publicly opposed to
Britain’s participation in World War II until the USSR entered the
war.’’ On that occasion Peierls did not go to Brookhaven, although
he did visit in 1966 when his son was on the staff. His attendance
at other American conferences was approved by the Atomic Energy
Commission, but only on the condition that ‘‘he would have no addi-
tional access to classified information other than he already had.’’
None of this amounted to evidence of espionage on the part of
Peierls, but his associations were certainly considered suspicious, de-
spite MI5’s assertion that no ‘‘sinister implications’’ could be drawn
from his friendship with Fuchs. Apart from being Fuchs’s confidant
and colleague, Peierls also had been close to the American physicist
G. E. Brown, who had lived with Peierls in 1950 and 1951, at the
beginning of a career at the University of Birmingham that was to last
until 1961 when he moved to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.
Originally from South Dakota, Brown had been educated at the Uni-